Rome, Italy, Dec 11, 2009 / 13:36 pm
Pope Benedict officially congratulated the Italian bishops’ conference for hosting this week’s “Conference on God.” He outlined the importance of such initiatives for keeping God within “man’s horizons,” because without Him “humanity loses its orientation and risks committing steps towards its own destruction.”
The conference was kicked off with a letter that the Holy Father wrote to the president of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco. In his message, the Pope praised the work of the episcopal conference and its cultural project committee in organizing this meeting of the minds “that confronts one of the great themes that has always fascinated and exposed the human spirit.”
“The question of God is central also for our age,” said the Pope, describing it as an era “in which we often tend to reduce man to just one dimension, the ‘horizontal,’ considering openness to the Transcendent irrelevant to his or her life.”
“The relationship with God … is essential for the path of humanity, the Church and each Christian has the duty to make God present in this world, to seek to open to men the access to God.”